Earlier today, an American Airlines plane with 170 people aboard caught fire at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. Everyone was evacuated alive, though there are some minor injuries. But now a second plane, this one operated by FedEx, has exploded at the Ft. Lauderdale airport in Florida.

The Obama administration is trying to check as many policy boxes as it can on the way out of the door, and today it finally announced a flexible framework for companies and governments involved in developing self-driving cars.

I grew up in Washington D.C., went to college in Vermont, and now live in Brooklyn, all places where bicycles are ridden by the very proud. Sorry, but I’ll never be impressed that you can balance on two objects—that’s what feet are for.

From afar, wind turbines look like such majestic things, turning lazily in the breeze and creating energy. Located on tops of mountains or in open fields, some people complain that they ruin the scenery, but I like them. And I’ve always wondered how something so big can get up to the top of a mountain. As it turns…

According to the LA Timesin 1923, it took streetcars 30 minutes to move just six blocks in downtown LA that summer. The automobile had invaded the city, and the streetcars were owned by private companies that didn’t want to spend any money on improvements. The dream? Elevating mass transit, like in the 1923 model…

This “electric carriage,” which appeared in the July 27, 1889 issue of Scientific American was way ahead of its time. How ahead of its time was it? South Dakota wasn’t even a state yet. The article that went along with it noted that the patent for this ingenious contraption was granted to one Mr. Harvey D. Dibble of…

It seems like every futurist and her sister wanted to turn cars into boats back in the 20th century. Remember the Water-Mobile of 1947? Or how about the poor man’s yacht of 1958? Well, this Jazz Age invention had them all beat.

Where will the first Hyperloop be? So far there are plans to use the tubular transportation system to move passengers in Slovakia and freight in Switzerland. But a proposed application for the Hyperloop announced today could solve a transportation conundrum that has been challenging planners for centuries: Connecting…

The smart city is on the horizon, and if Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs has anything to do with it, it’ll have subsidized ride-sharing, “Airbnb for cars,” and AI that helps parking cops fine the most people.

The late 1930s were dark times for Britain. War was on the horizon, and things were about to get very, very tough. But some periodicals tried keeping things light with utopian visions of tomorrow. Like this March 5, 1938 cover of Modern Wonder which featured the streamlined transportation of the future. The magazine…

A recent survey shows that people want self-driving cars to be programmed to minimize casualties during a crash, even if it causes the death of the rider. Trouble is, the same survey shows that people don’t actually want to ride in cars that are programmed this way. That’s obviously a problem—and we’re going to have…

Of the seven cities chosen as finalists for the US Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, Columbus, Ohio may have seemed like the underdog. (It was the only finalist that has no rail system whatsoever.) But today, USDOT announced Columbus as the winner of over $50 million in cash that will transform its…

Last night, a DC subway station turned into a surprise water park ride. It wasn’t a huge deal—the station was closed for a few hours, the water drained, and service went back to normal—but it certainly looked like it. Seeing a timelapse of the whole thing from the station’s entrance shows how this happened.

If you are exactly like me, you live in a dense urban environment and assume that dense urban environments are the way of the future, and suburbs are dark hellpits full of enormous PetSmart outlets and molly-soaked teens. But perhaps this is incorrect?

Last year, NASA casually announced its intention to disrupt the aviation industry by sticking fully electric commercial passenger planes in the sky in 20 years. In a small step toward that goal, space agency director Charles Bolden has just announced plans for the X-57, the first all-electric addition to the famous…